On Sept. 18, 2000, I organized a "peer-to-peer summit" to
explore the bounds of peer-to-peer networking. In my invitation to the
attendees, I set out three goals:

To make a statement about the nature of peer-to-peer and what types of technologies people
should be thinking of in the same frame.

To introduce other people who I like and respect, and are working on
different aspects of what could be seen as the same problem, to create some
additional connections between technical communities that ought to be talking
to and learning from one another.

To brainstorm about the issues we're uncovering, especially where
some forethought can help the various projects from reinventing the
wheel, and where some cooperation might accelerate mutual growth.

This is exactly what we did with the
open-source summit.
By bringing together people from many projects, we were able to get the world
to recognize that free software was more than GNU and Linux; we introduced
a lot of people, many of whom, remarkably, had never met; we talked shop;
and ultimately, we crafted a new "meme" that completely reshaped the way
people thought about the space.

The people I invited do tell part of the story: Gene Kan from
Gnutella and Ian
Clarke from Freenet
were obvious choices. They matched the current industry buzz about
peer-to-peer file sharing. Similarly, Marc Hedlund and Nelson Minar from
Popular Power made
sense, because there was already a sense of some kind of connection between
distributed computation and file sharing. But why did I invite Jeremie Miller
of Jabber and Ray Ozzie of
Groove, Ken Arnold from
Sun's Jini project and Michael Tiemann
of Red Hat, Marshall Rose, author of
BXXP and IMXP,
Rael Dornfest of
Meerkat and RSS 1.0, Dave
Stutz of Microsoft, Andy
Hertzfeld of Eazel,
Don Box, one of the authors of
SOAP, and Steve Burbeck,
one of the authors of UDDI.
(Note that not all of these people made it to the summit; some sent
substitutes.)

As I said in my invitation:

[I've invited] a group of people who collectively bracket what
I consider a new paradigm, which could perhaps best be summarized by Sun's
slogan, "the network is the computer." They're all working on parts of what
I consider the next generation net story.

This article reports on some of the ideas discussed at the summit. It also
continues the job of trying to reshape the way people think about that
"next generation net story" and the role of peer-to-peer in telling that
story. The concepts we use are, at bottom, maps of reality. Bad maps lead to
bad decisions. If we believe peer-to-peer is about illegal sharing of
copyrighted material, we'll continue to see rhetoric about copyright and
censorship at the heart of the debate, and we may push for ill-advised legal
restrictions on the use of the technology. If we believe it's about a wider
class of decentralized networking applications, we'll be focused on
understanding what those applications are good for and on advancing the state
of the art.

This article also gives some background on one of the tools I used at the
meeting -- something I'll call a "meme map" -- and presents the results of
the meeting as one of those maps. This map is also useful in understanding
the thinking behind the O'Reilly's
P2P directory.
This broader map has two benefits. First, the peer-to-peer community can use
it to organize itself -- to understand who is doing related work, and identify
areas where developers can learn from each other. Second, the meme map helps
the community influence outsiders. It can create excitement where there
previously was indifference and turn negative impressions into positive ones.

First, though, a bit of background.

From Business Models to Meme Maps

Recently, I started working with Dan and Meredith Beam of
Beam, Inc., a strategy
consulting firm. Dan and Meredith help companies build their "business
models" -- one-page pictures that describe "how all the elements of a business
work together to build marketplace advantage and company value." It's easy to
conclude that two companies selling similar products and services are in the
same business; the Beams think otherwise.

For example, O'Reilly and
IDG compete in the computer
book publishing business, but we have different business models.
IDG's strategic positioning is to appeal to the "dummy" who needs to learn
about computers but doesn't really want to; O'Reilly's is to appeal to the
people who love computers and want to go as deep as possible.

IDG's marketing
strategy is to dominate retail outlets and "big box" stores in hopes of
putting product in front of consumers who might happen to walk by in search
of any book on a given subject. O'Reilly's marketing strategy is to build
awareness of our brand and products in the core developer and user
communities who then buy directly or drive traffic to retail outlets. One
strategy pushes product into distribution channels to reach unknown consumers;
the other pulls products into distribution channels in response to queries
from consumers who are already looking for the product.

Both companies are
extremely successful, but our different business models require different
competencies. I won't say more lest this article turn into a lesson for
O'Reilly competitors, but, hopefully, I have said enough to get the idea
across.

Boiling all the elements of your business down to a one-page picture
is a really useful exercise. But what is even more useful is that Dan and
Meredith have you run the exercise twice, once to describe your present
business and once to describe it as you want it to be.

At any rate, fresh from the strategic planning process at O'Reilly, it struck
me that an adaptation of this idea would be useful preparation for the summit.
We weren't modeling a single business; we were modeling a space, and the
key projects, concepts and messages associated with it.

I call these pictures "meme maps" rather than "business models" in honor of
Richard Dawkins' wonderful formulation of memes as ideas that spread and
reproduce themselves and are passed on from mind to mind. Just as gene
engineering allows us to artificially shape genes, meme-engineering lets us
organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively,
and have the desired effect once they are transmitted.

Richard Koman's WeblogSupreme Court Decides Unanimously Against Grokster
Updating as we go. Supremes have ruled 9-0 in favor of the studios in MGM v Grokster. But does the decision have wider import? Is it a death knell for tech? It's starting to look like the answer is no.
(Jun 27, 2005)